Born Standing Up

A Comic's Life

SCRIBNER; 209 PAGES; $25

In the late 1970s, before he was a movie star, Steve Martin did stand-up comedy in arenas that packed in thousands. He appeared repeatedly on "Saturday Night Live" and Johnny Carson's "Tonight" show and sold millions of copies of his comedy albums, "Let's Get Small" and "A Wild and Crazy Guy." He made the covers of Rolling Stone and Newsweek.

"I was now the biggest concert comedian in show business, ever," Martin writes with more awe than hubris in his memoir, "Born Standing Up," which chronicles the long, hard road to that success. Of his 18 years as a magician and stand-up comic, beginning at the age of 15 at Disneyland, he says he spent 10 years learning, four refining his act and four in "wild success."

Along with Woody Allen and Garrison Keillor, Martin belongs to an elite trio of American humorists who simultaneously made their names performing and writing. All three not only write their own material but also have published extremely funny books as well as polished "casuals" in the New Yorker.

Early in his career, Martin realized that if his goal was originality, he would have to create every gag himself. For a time, he supported his stage habit with writing jobs, including a stint at "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour," for which he was one of eight writers who won an Emmy after the show's demise. When Martin segued from stand-up to movies, like Allen, he wrote (or co-wrote) his screenplays - including "The Jerk," "L.A. Story" and "Roxanne" - although he did not direct. And like Keillor, he also writes novels, including "Shopgirl."

Given his literary chops, one brings higher expectations to Martin's memoir than to the usual celebrity tell-all. And it is better written than the standard star turn. That said, don't expect anything on a par with his more creative work, such as his wonderful Stoppardesque play, "Picasso at the Lapin Agile." He's traded his signature zaniness for a (relatively) straightforward earnestness. We keep expecting punch lines and deflations - but that's the performing Martin. He'd have us believe this is the real, sincere Steve Martin.

"Born Standing Up" isn't actually a tell-all: Martin, like Carson, whom he defends from accusations of aloofness, is too polite to tell all. But he does mention his strained relationship with his angry father (who once raised welts in an unprovoked beating), his first sexual experience (with a fellow performer who became a Christian proselytizer), his panic attacks and hypochondria, his "abundant and selfish" sex life in the free-love 1970s and, movingly, his later reconciliation with his family.

Mostly, though, he tells us about his work: a classic story of perseverance, guts, unrelenting drive and focus.

Martin was drawn to magic early. In 1955, at 10, he got a job distributing guidebooks at Disneyland, 2 miles from his home. His lovely description of opening day: It was "so sweltering the asphalt on Main Street was as soft as a yoga mat." Through his adolescence, he worked in the magic shop, honing his skills. "Disneyland was my Versailles," he writes.

One of the more remarkable stories Martin tells is about encountering a photographer taking a shot of the Magic Castle on his last day working at Disneyland. Nearly 40 years later, Martin, by then an avid collector of modern art, bought that photograph: "The photographer, it turned out, was Diane Arbus." He wonders whether Arbus saw the ersatz castle as kitsch. "Perhaps," he writes hopefully, "she saw it as I did: beautiful."

Martin paints a portrait of a man with a mission. He learned timing from playing 25 short shows a week at the Bird Cage Theatre at Knott's Berry Farm through his college years. Studying philosophy at Long Beach State College yielded a lifetime's worth of inane material. He kept notes on his performances, constantly tightening and revising his act, aiming for surreal, strange, physical, "unbridled nonsense."

His 20s were spent on the road playing bars and coffeehouses in the days before comedy clubs. It was grueling and lonely. He opened for Ann-Margret in Las Vegas, where Elvis told him he had "an ob-leek sense of humor."

Martin enriches his saga with recollections of "odd little gags such as 'How many people have never raised their hands before?' " and the origin of his signature, "Well, excuuuuse me." His closing line was typical of the goofy, existential, absurdist nature of his comedy: "Well, we've had a good time tonight, considering we're all going to die someday."

Martin was elated with his hard-won success, but not happy. "By 1981 my act was like an overly plumed bird whose next evolutionary step was extinction," he sums up succinctly. He says he moved on to movies without a backward glance - until he came to write this book. He seems to have enjoyed the nostalgic trip. Fans will, too. {sbox}